CHOT Researchers

Under Construction

Nathaniel Bastian, PhD

Assistant Professor
Smeal College of Business
Pennsylvania State Universityndbastian@psu.edu

Dr. Bastian is a leader, practitioner, researcher, and educator of quantitative, economic, computational, and data-driven methods to support the improvement of operational processes, decision-making, performance, and management in healthcare delivery systems, national security and military operations, and humanitarian logistics. As an experienced operations researcher, data scientist, decision analyst and industrial engineer, his expertise lies in the discovery and translation of data-driven, actionable insights into effective decisions using mathematics, statistics, engineering, economics, and computational science to develop decision-support models for descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics.

Eun Kyoung Choe, PhD

Eva Lee, PhD
CHOT- GIT Site Director

Professor
Director, Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare
H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technologyeva.lee@gatech.edu

Dr. Eva K Lee is a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. She works in the area of mathematical programming and large-scale computational algorithms with a primary emphasis on medical/healthcare decision analysis and logistics operations management. Her research in logistics focuses on large-scale optimization and algorithmic advances for optimal operations planning and resource allocation. She has developed decision support systems for inventory control; large-scale truck dispatching, scheduling, and transportation logistics; telecommunications; portfolio investment; and emergency treatment response and facility layout and planning.

Christina Mastrangelo, PhD
CHOT – UW Site Director

Associate Professor
College of Industrial and Systems Engineering
University of Washingtonmastr@uw.edu

Dr. Mastrangelo’s primary research field is systems engineering, quality engineering and predictive analytics. Her research interests include the areas of operational modeling for manufacturing, system-level modeling for infectious disease transmission and lung-cancer screening centers, multivariate quality prediction, statistical monitoring methods for manufacturing and hierarchical response modeling.

George Naufal, PhD

Dr. Naufal’s primary research includes migration and its consequences mainly the impact of remittances on the remitting countries. His secondary research interests include the effects of social networks on different aspects of the economy. George’s research has focused mostly on the Middle East and North Africa region with an emphasis on the Gulf countries.

Jose Pinto Duarte, PhD

Chair and Director
Stukeman Center for Design Computing
Pennsylvania State University

George Mann, RA, AIA

Prof. Mann has 50 years’ experience designing health facilities, through his practice, teaching and research. Established an international reputation as a leader in health facilities design, taught over 4,000 students, undertaken over 800 architecture for health projects internationally.

Xuemei Zhu, PhD

Dr. Zhu is interested in healthy community design, non-motorized transportation, and public health; healthcare facility design; and general environment-behavior research as well as its application with a focus on health, disparity, and sustainability.

Jennifer Kraschnewski, MD, MPH

Dr. Bolin’s primary research area includes rural and minority Disparities. She is the Director of the Texas A&M Southwest Rural Health Research Center (SRHRC) recently was awarded a 4-year, $2.8 million dollar grant as one of seven cooperative research center agreements funded nationally by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to research critical health issues facing rural populations in our country.

Nancy Borkowski, DBA, CPA, FACHE, FHFMA, CHOT- UAB Site Co-Director

Professor
Executive Doctoral Program
School of Health Professions
University of Alabama Birminghamnborkows@uab.edu

Dr. Nancy Borkowski is a Professor in the Department of Health Services Administration at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She has over 20 years of experience in the healthcare industry and is a two-time past recipient of the American College of Healthcare Executive’s (ACHE) Southern Florida Senior Career Healthcare Executive Award, which recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to the advancement of health management excellence.

Darrell Burke, PhD

Associate Professor,
Health Services Administration University of Alabama at Birminghamdburke.fsu@gmail.com

Nathaniel Carroll, PhD

Dr. Carroll’s research focuses on the financial management of healthcare organizations and has been published in theAmerican Journal of Managed Care, Health Services and Outcomes Research Methodology, Inquiry and the Journal of Rural Health. He has worked in both the managed care and long-term care sectors.

Kayla Cline

Kenneth Cochran, DSc, RN, MBA, FACHE

Dr. Cochran worked within hospitals since he was 16 years old. By working his way up from a Nursing Assistant to his current position, he has essential skills needed to build relationships with patients, physicians, hospital staff, and regional representatives. His specialties include healthcare management and leadership, medical education, change management, and acute care hospitals.

Christopher DeFlitch, MD

Dr. Christopher Deflitch is an emergency medicine doctor in Hershey, Pennsylvania and is affiliated with Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. He received his medical degree from Penn State College of Medicine and has been in practice for more than 20 years. He is one of 35 doctors at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center who specialize in Emergency Medicine.

Allyson Hall, PhD

Professor
Health Services Administration
University of Alabama at Birminghamhallag@uab.edu

Dr. Hall’s broad research interests emphasize improving healthcare access and systems for vulnerable populations. Current scholarly activity focuses on reducing fragmentation within the delivery system including assessments of patient-centered medical homes and transition to primary care programs for emergency department patients.

Christopher Johnson, PhD
CHOT – UL Site Director

Dr. Christopher E. Johnson specializes in work that seeks to understand how health care organizations and communities impact health care outcomes for veterans, under-served populations, and the elderly.

Deirdre McCaughey, PhD, MBA

Program Director
M.S. in Healthcare Quality and Safety Programs
School of Health Professions
University of Alabama Birminghamdeirdre1@uab.edu

Dr. Deirdre McCaughey is an associate professor in the Department of Health Services Administration. She is also the program director for the Graduate programs. Her research involves examining organizational factors, such as leadership and organizational culture, in healthcare institutions that influence healthcare provider and workforce well-being and subsequently optimize organizational quality and patient safety outcomes.

Tapan Mehta, PhD

Dr. Mehta’s interests lie in aggregating and integrating silos of genomic, epidemiological and administrative data, to investigate interesting scientific questions, through novel applications of statistical methods and computing platforms. He is especially interested in pursuing scientific inquiry in topics related to obesity, longevity, disability, and health policy and interventions.

Nilam Ram, PhD

Professor
Human Development & Family Studies and Psychology
Pennsylvania State Universitynur5@psu.edu

Dr. Ram’s studies are focused on how short-term changes (e.g., processes such as learning, information processing, etc.) develop over the course of the lifespan and how intra-individual change and variability study designs (e.g., measurement bursts) might contribute to our knowledge base. Current projects include examinations of age differences in short-term dynamics at the cognitive/affective/temperament interface; cyclic patterns in the day-to-day progression of emotions; and change in cognition and well-being over the lifespan, particularly in the oldest old.

Midge Ray, PhD, RN, CCS

Dr. Ray’s research has included using technology in health behavior change (tobacco cessation), safe medication use, and medication adherence in primary care practices. Dr. Ray is a subject matter expert in ICD-9-CM, CPT, ICD-10-CM and ICD-10-PCS coding systems. She has over 40 publications in peer reviewed journals and been a co-author on two different manuscripts that received the Distinguished Paper Awards from American Medical Informatics Association.

Stephen Timmons, PhD
CHOT – UN Site Director

Dr. Stephen Timmons is the Joint Director of the Centre for Health Innovation, Leadership and Learning (CHILL) at Nottingham University Business School, UK. His professional background is as a manager in the UK National Health Service and his academic background is in sociology. Dr. Timmons’s expertise lies in NHS policy, NHS management, NHS finance and computer systems in healthcare, especially why they fail.

Robert Weech-Maldonado, PhD, MBA, CHOT- UAB Site Co-Director

Professor and L.R. Jordan Chair of Health Administration
School of Health Professions
University of Alabama Birminghamrweech@uab.edu

Dr. Robert Weech-Maldonado is a Professor in the Department of Health Services Administration. He is a national authority in health disparities, cultural competency tools for healthcare organizations, racial and ethnic differences in patient experiences with care, and long-term care. Imparting this expertise to students, researchers and healthcare leaders may improve management’s ability to fully understand and better address challenges faced by racial/ethnic minorities and the elderly, possibly dramatically improving access and quality of care outcomes for these populations.

Ferhat Zengul, PhD, MBA

Assistant Professor, Health Care Management
University of Alabama at Birminghamferhat@uab.edu

Dr. Zengul’s broad research focus is the performance of healthcare organizations with an emphasis on clinical and financial performance. He is particularly interested in the impact of technological investments and various facility design interventions on the clinical and financial performance of health care facilities. Recently, Zengul received a faculty development grant to investigate the relationship between hospital capital investments and patient perceptions of quality. He is currently working on an SQL-based data-warehouse and data-mining infrastructure to support this particular grant and future potential projects.

Alva Ferdinand, DrPH, JD

Dr. Alva Ferdinand’s research interests include effectiveness of laws aimed at improving public health, state and federal regulation of health care delivery, health law and ethics, research integrity, and disparities in health outcomes. She is an assistant professor in the Health & Policy Management at the School of Public Health.

Amarnath Banerjee

Dr. Banerjee’s research interests are in modeling, simulation and visualization, with applications in health care systems, information systems and manufacturing systems. He serves on the leadership team of the multidisciplinary Texas A&M Health Regional Extension Center at RCHI. He teaches courses in simulation, health care systems and industrial engineering design.

Conrad Tucker, PhD, CHOT- PSU Site Director

Associate Professor
College of Engineering
Penn State Universityctucker4@psu.edu

Dr. Tucker research interest include product portfolio/family design, sustainable system design optimization in the areas of energy generation systems, consumer electronics, environment, healthcare and national security. He is the director of the Design Analysis Technology Advancement (D.A.T.A) Laboratory.

Farzan Sasangothar

Dr. Sasangohar’s research interests are centered around understanding and improving human decision-making and performance in multi-task, safety-critical work environments using a wide range of analytical techniques and technological innovations such as remote continuous monitoring and connected integrated systems. He is interested and has experience in designing, implementing, and testing systems that improve human-systems performance in socio-technical domains such as healthcare, air-traffic control, command and control, process control, and surface transportation.

Thomas Ferris, PhDCHOT Center Co-Director

Dr. Thomas Ferris’ research interests are in Human Factors and Cognitive Ergonomics, and can be described as the study of cognition in human-machine engineered systems. His primary focus involves human information processing and design to support attention and interruption management. In particular, he investigates novel interface design techniques, employing alternative display modalities such as the sense of touch.